April 9, 2008

Planetwide’s Mark Politi talks about creating the resources to allow people to tell their stories in a very graphic way
By Michael Lafferty

“We wanted a platform that allowed people to tell a story.”

There was a television show that once stated there were a “million stories in the Naked City (name of the television show)” and then went into the show segment by telling that story. If you take it a bit further and realize that in the plethora of human experience, every person has a story (or stories) but while some are told down through generations, others are lost for lack of a way to share that story.

Ok, sure, Comic Book Creator 2 – from Planetwide Games – is not the end-all for story-telling, but it is a remarkable way to tell a story, whether in comic book format, in graphic novel format, or simply with graphic-driven panels to forward the tale. The reason that the program is so easy is the drag-and-drop technology it employs, allowing almost any graphical format to be dragged into the frames – even .AVI movie formats. This means that the program seamlessly integrates with graphics programs (like Corel’s DRAW, or Adobe’s Photoshop, or even Bryce and Poser) and then allows the user to use those images to tell a unique story and share in a variety of ways. They can be posted to the Web, saved as a PDF or JPG and shared in a variety of ways.

And using the program is so simple a child could do it … literally. The younger members of the household were having as much fun as the older ones in dropping in images (even digital pictures of the pets) and creating fun and inventive stories.

GameZone got a chance to chat with Mark Politi (VP – Licensing and Media Relations for Planetwide):

Question: The Comic Book Creator is a great program that offers so much with very little work. It is robust and very user friendly. What was the impetus behind creating a program like that?

Mark: The initial product was designed for people to tell a story. We all grew up seeing comic books, comic strips and graphic novels. For many people the first book they ever read was a comic book because as a little kid, that was the first thing they got their hands on. We all know the format of a comic book, most of us have never been able to do that on our own, so we took that mindset and said we’ll try to deliver a super-simple, easy-to-use platform that lets anybody tell stories in a graphical format. The original product was called the Comic Book Creator that the Comic Book Creator 2 is based on. What we tried to do with the new version is try to add things to it that beefed up the program.

We added the ability to drag and drop video and audio files. If you drag a video file into one of the page panels it will operate and when you output your digital flip-book it will actually output a video file to that digital flipbook. It will also allow you to drag and drop audio files.

We also realized there was a real need for people to have great control of what they were doing, but we wanted to make it fast; it’s a smaller sized client. It’s a more complex program but it has a smaller footprint so the application is faster and cleaner.

It is amazingly easy to use and the end-product looks … well … amazing …

Mark: We have professional animators that have been using it. If you have been using Photoshop and high-end graphics programs, then you are graphically trained but we wanted to provide a toolset for the average individual. The software also comes bundled with a couple of extra programs that have to be installed separately. One is called Fraps, which is a frame-grabbing software. Fraps will actually allow you to grab frames from a PC video game and bring those action screen shots into your Comic Book Creator to tell a story. It is also bundled with PD Particles, which is a drawing program and Audacity, which is a sound-editing program.

One of the coolest new features, which is in the resource manager where you manage the images and clipart, the far right one is a browser button (whether you have IE or Firebox) and what that allows you to do is basically open up browser and you can go into Google images and search for whatever you want and drag straight from Google Images into the software. As long as the source Web site doesn’t protect it, it drags right in there.

We have a lot of schools that are integrating the software into their computer labs because they realize that kids want to tell stories but they want to tell it in a more graphic and fun way, and our software has been used in that way to help kids tell their stories, but in comic book form. Because it takes no training to use it, teachers can give kids a homework assignment … say ‘give me a story about flowers and tell me the story about what flowers think’ – a very ambiguous storyline. But then the kids can go out and create whatever they want, go out and take pictures, bring in their own content, and a very interesting product is put out because everyone uses it in different ways.

That is part of the joy of it because you can use your own digital pictures and then create a story, create the story and then send it along to grandma and grandpa …

Mark: Comic Book Creator was designed to allow people to tell stories and we’ve basically taken that and run with it.

Integrating the use of game screens into the program is a nice twist. Video games, and massively multiplayer games – by their very nature – are interactive. Croft’s Richard Garrett has said that games are all about your story, with the ‘your’ referring to the gamer, so it seems like a natural progression to take that concept and move it along.

Mark: We came from the MMO space ourselves, so we understand what people are trying to do. But when you went out last night and killed 4,000 people, won all this virtual gold and won this major battle, and then you go to school the next day or go to work and try to tell people what you did, they think you are nuts – especially if you are not into the gaming space. We thought it would be cool if you could take that game action and then save it and then share it with your friends in a tangible way. That’s how the Comic Book Creator came about. We saw there was a need there for gamers to tell a story.

The CBC is the core product but you have different branding, like the Marvel brand, which has Marvel content to draw from, or Charlotte’s Web or Speed Racer. When you go out to get licenses like that, how do you determine what is viable?

Mark: Sometimes things surprise. I was sitting at the New York Comic Con a few years ago and a guy walks up to me. He had a badge on, but I didn’t recognize the name; his name was Stu Levy. I didn’t know who Stu Levy was at the time, but he said ‘can you do this for things other than comics?’ I said, ‘what sort of other things did you have in mind?’ He said, ‘what do you think about manga?’ I thought that would be an interesting thing, so he said ‘give this guy a call,’ so I called and it turned out to be the CEO of TOKYOPOP. So we ended up doing the TOKYOPOP MANGA Creator, which lets kids make their own mange with licensed TOKYOPOP content. That’s currently selling in (selected) Borders across the country.

We built a platform here and it scales across different brands. … it’s been an interesting evolution. We never thought it would do the things that it’s done and every so often something will come to us that we’ve never thought of before.

We got very granular with the simplicity of it. Like my 6-year old, he uses it. He’ll download line art from the Web and we’ll make custom color books for him. We are downloading all this beautiful line art that is free for the kids and we drop them in and then print them out for him and he does the coloring.

You make the game for the lowest common denominator, which might be the person who approaches a computer tentatively, or just is afraid of trying new software …

Mark: Everyone of us has digital pictures, either they were sent to us or we have them on our digital cameras or cell phones. We wanted a platform that allowed people to tell a story.

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